6. Teaching (B)

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By Graham Noble

Several of those old photos of Miyagi teaching show the students practising prearranged kumite or applications of kata movements. A few techniques reoccur, such as the double level block and front kick counter (Saifa?), leg takedown (Kururunfa?) and two-hand attack to the head following a takedown attempt (Saifa or Sepai), but it’s unclear how much of this practice took place in the regular class; most of the technical training seemed to be centred on kata. But that the techniques were there at all is interesting.

Meitoku Yagi said that Miyagi gave out the kata slowly and the accepted history on this seems to be that students learned Sanchin and maybe two other kata, the tradition in the old days being not to learn too many forms. But this seems to be an odd way to teach and spread your system, knowledge of which would then be fragmented among different students in a rather haphazard way. Of course, students could learn kata from each other, and this may have been what happened, but then the instruction would have been at second hand, without the direct input of the master himself. It is often said that even after years of traning, Jinan Shinzato, Miyagi’s favourite student, only knew two or three kata: Sanchin and Seisan, and presumably Tensho. One of the stories about Shinzato is that Miyagi wanted to teach him more kata but he always declined, saying that he hadn’t mastered Seisan yet. Well, perhaps, but Shinzato was regarded as a successor to Chojun Miyagi. He was killed in the war, but supposing Miyagi had died before him and Shinzato had taken on the leadership of Goju Ryu – how could he have transmitted Miyagi’s teaching when he knew only two or three of the school’s kata? There were some students who claimed to have learned all the kata - Meitoku Yagi, for example, who said that he had gone to Seko Higa’s dojo in the early 1930s to teach the kata Saifa, Sanseru, Sepai, Shisochin and Kururunfa to Higa’s students - but generally full knowledge of all the Goju kata remained rare, even into the 1950s. Akio Kinjo, who began learning karate in Seko Higa’s dojo in the early 1950s recalled that at that time (1953) “there were only five or six karateka who could perform Suparimpei well.”

Although he may have been slow in progressing students through the kata, Miyagi actually taught a fairly large number of forms. Originally there were nine kata in Goju Ryu: Sanchin, Seiunchin, Saifa, Seisan, Shisochin, Sanseru, Sepai, Kururunfa and Suparimpei, and he added two kata of his own devising: Tensho, probably in the 1920s, and then Gekisai (two forms) around 1940. Gekisai was a fairly late basic kata, introduced at a time when several teachers were developing such basic training forms as a way of standardising and systematising karate instruction. Gichin Funakoshi, for example, introduced the Taikyoku kata around 1940 and Genwa Nakasone’s 1938 “Karate Do Taikan” included a set of “Karate-Do Kihon Kata”, twelve simple block-kick-punch forms. These kata were developed in 1937 as a standard set of basic training forms for Okinawan karate but they do not seem to have been widely accepted, and for the most part, they fell out of use. Miyagi, who was actually at a preliminary meeting to discuss the development of the new kata, never used them but he did develop two basic training forms for Goju Ryu: Gekisai 1 (Dai Ichi) and 2 (Dai Ni). If anything these kata follow an Itosu style format with an embusen broadly similar to Itosu’s Pinan, although they include some Goju-type techniques, such as the trademark front kick and vertical elbow strike. Gekisai Dai Ichi is the same kata as Matsubayashi Shorin Ryu’s Fukyu Kata 2, althought there are slight performance differences between the two schools: the blocks are snapped in Matsubayashi Ryu and brought out in a curving movement in Goju Ryu, for example. Shoshin Nagamine, the founder of Matsubayashi Shorin Ryu, wrote in his 1976 book “The Essence of Okinwan Karate Do”, that “(The) Two Fukyugata commonly practiced today were composed by Shosin Nagamine, the originator of Matsubayashi-ryu karate, and Chojun Miyagi, the originator of Goju-ryu karate, because the kata of the Shuri and Naha schools had been too difficult for beginners. In 1940, two of the compositions were authorised as formal basic kata by the special committee of Okinawan Karate-do organised and summoned by Gen. Hayakawa, then governor of Okinawa Prefecture.” According to Charles Goodin, who looked at the work of that special committee, Fukyu Kata 1 was created by Nagamine and Fukyu kata 2 – Gekisai 1 – by Miyagi. Although Nagamine incorporated both forms into his teaching, Miyagi chose not to use Nagamine’s kata (a kata clearly based on Pinan Nidan) and instead developed a second Gekisai kata which closely follows the first but in its second half replaces the middle forearm blocks with the characteristic Goju Ryu hiki-uke (kake-uke) and also ends the kata with two mawashi-uke rather than the double punches of Gekisai 1/Fukyu 2.

Tensho, although outwardly simple and consisting of just a few defensive hand movements linked together, has come to be seen as the kata of the expert karateka – the “soft” technique of Tensho complementing the “hard” of Sanchin. It’s possible that Miyagi may have gotten the idea for Tensho from some Chinese forms he had seen, or maybe from the Crane style of his friend Go Ken Ki: some Crane forms have similar (but not the same) movements. Another view is that he got the idea from illustrations of six hand positions in the old book “Bubishi”, though the movements shown there are not directly comparable. Those illustrations are described as Rokkishu, and to complicate things a little more, To-on Ryu also has a form called Rokkishu. However, Mario McKenna was told by Shigekazu Kanzaki that the To-on Ryu Rokkishu is not a kata but “simply a very short series of techniques, those being the rising crane head block/dropping shuto and the horizontal crane head block/palm heel strike. That’s it. Nothing more.” Whether, then, there was some simple pre-existing exercise that Miyagi formalised into a kata or whether Kyoda got the blocking sequence from Miyagi or someone else, we can’t say. Anyway, Tensho is regarded as the complementary kata to Sanchin, thus rounding out the Goju system. It was a favourite kata of Miyagi and traditionally it is a kata favoured by the old masters. Eichi Miyazato told the English karateka Bob Honiball that “Tensho is the last kata of the style and it may take as long as fifty years to understand it,” a statement which in modern terms doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Part of Tensho is shown in the Okinawan footage shot by Professor Yanagi in 1940: like Sanchin it is done slowly, with muscular tension and forceful breathing. Surprisingly, that is not the first footage we have of the kata: the hand movements of Tensho are also shown in the film made several years earlier (1933?) by the Keio University Karate Club. Keio was a mainstream Shotokan club, the first of the many Shotokan university clubs in fact, and yet the characteristic Tensho techniques are shown, albeit briefly, in the section on basic blocking and attacking movements: they appear as something like a demonstration of special blocking techniques. Quite how the form got into Keio is unknown, presumably during one of Chojun Miyagi’s visists to Tokyo, (1932, maybe, when he met Gichin Funakoshi). And interestingly it has been retained within the club, although possibly not as part of the core teaching.

The 2009 two-volume DVD of the Keio University Club put out by the French “Karate Bushido” magazine (“Karate-Do Shotokan Vol. 2”, un film de Cyril Guenet) shows the Keio Tensho performed by eighty year old Akiyoshi Iwamoto. It follows the Goju form, but with less audible breathing and a few slight stylistic differences. It lacks the flow, strength and feel of the Goju Ryu kata and the applications shown, simple blocks and counters, are unconvincing. Those applications, incidentally, are all performed in a Shotokan-type zenkutsu dachi, so presumably the Shotokan people have not found the Sanchin-dachi a very practical stance for kumite.

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